The paradox of taste and alcohol: Rethinking our relationship with food and drinking
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TL;DR
The more you drink, the more desensitized your taste becomes to certain flavours, this gets in the way of your enjoyment of certain foods when paired with alcohol.
It’s possible to regain your sense of taste because taste buds have a short lifespan.
This means that you can train yourself to like alcohol-free alternatives, and when you cut back on alcohol consumption, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by all the tastes you’ll perceive.
During the first month or so after Sarah Kate started rethinking drinking and removed alcohol from her diet, her craving for sugar went through the roof. This wasn’t something Sarah was expecting, though. “I was reading a bunch of books in advance, and they said to expect your taste buds to change, everything's going to taste so good,” Sarah says. “It didn't happen right away though.” The sugar cravings came first.
A quick Google search of “taste buds after alcohol” yields a few optimistic articles rejoicing at the return of your pleasure in tastes you probably didn’t like when you regularly drank. Many of the articles stress a key point that is always overlooked and misunderstood about alcohol: it anesthetizes your mouth and numbs your taste buds upon impact.
Turns out there’s a lot taking place in our minds and mouths when we consume and subsequently remove alcohol from our day to day life - just like when you quit sugar or salt. In these cases, everything tastes bland for awhile until your taste buds eventually adapt and higher levels of either salt or sugar become unbearable. While it is the case that our taste buds are reborn every few weeks (250 hours approximately) regardless of whether we consume alcohol or not, something different and visceral takes place physiologically when we are regular drinkers and this has long-term effects. The inability to taste nuances in food is just the tip of the iceberg.
Turns out, in a rather ironic way, regular or excessive drinkers are less sensitive to taste and consequently are less likely to take pleasure in food when compared to occasional or non-drinkers.
This is ironic because of the place alcohol, especially wine, holds in the culinary world — a sommelier’s whole job is to tell us which alcoholic bevvy pairs well with which food, after all. In other words, if a person is a heavy drinker, regardless of how perfect a sommelier’s recommendation, data suggests that they might be less likely to take pleasure in the meal.
This is according to a 2016 study published in Oxford University Press’ Alcohol and Alcoholism journal. The study states that when we drink alcohol in high amounts, we negatively impact how we can taste food, and if our taste is off, then we take less pleasure in eating, meaning we are more likely to develop nutritional or immune deficiencies.
The study looked at a group of non-drinkers (those who drank alcohol occasionally, such as on weekends or on holidays, or not at all) and people with alcohol use disorder (people undergoing treatment for their alcohol dependency). Through a series of sensory tests in a lab, researchers administered increasingly intense samples of the sweet and salty tastes to determine the participants’ threshold for each taste. The researchers didn’t notice too significant a difference in threshold for the salty taste among the alcohol-dependent and non-alcoholic group, meaning that excessive consumption of alcohol doesn’t have too great an impact on our ability to taste salty things. But the sweet taste told a different story.
Researchers found that compared to the non-drinker group, the research subjects recovering from alcohol use disorder were less sensitive to the sweet taste, meaning their threshold for it was higher. In other words, the more alcohol a person drinks, the more sugar they will need to consume before they taste it in any meaningful way. According to the study, consuming alcohol for a long period will decrease your sensitivity to sweetness, meaning that you will be more likely to consume more sweet things, which in turn will have a negative impact on your health.
What’s more, the study suggests that a general preference for sugar can lead a person to an alcohol dependence. “My body was seeking out that sugar, and [wine was] what it was being awarded with,” Sarah says. A preference for sweet can paradoxically lead to a low sensitivity to the taste, in other words. A person who consumes alcohol regularly and excessively might add more sugar to their morning cup of coffee than the average person, for example, because a large quantity is what it would take for the sweetness to register. But where does pleasure fit in all of this?
According to the study, when the ability to taste the nuances in a sweet food go out the window, a person can develop a smaller appetite. And a small appetite in turn gets in the way of a person taking any kind of sensory pleasure in food. If a particular food like fruit doesn’t taste good, or doesn’t register as sweet at all, what’s the point in eating it?
“According to the study, consuming alcohol for a long period will decrease your sensitivity to sweetness, meaning that you will be more likely to consume more sweet things, which in turn will have a negative impact on your health, leading you, in the long term, to potentially develop a thiamine deficiency or diabetes. ”
After Sarah began rethinking drinking, and after the period during which she craved sugar (a craving she would otherwise have satisfied with wine), food did indeed begin to taste better, she says. “I’m enjoying fruit a lot more than I used to,” she says.
General pleasure, that is, both physiological and psychological pleasure, in consuming a meal has also increased for Sarah. “Now at a restaurant, I’m eating food and this is all I’m focused on,” she says. “I'm enjoying the process of eating more, and my taste buds are enjoying the taste and the texture more. There is nothing getting in the way of the food.”
While a glass of red did help to break down a steak dinner in her mouth, the elevated experience of the meal lost its fullness in terms of pleasure because of the wine, too. “I'm on this [rethinking drinking] side of it, and I can see that, after two glasses of wine, my taste buds were anesthetized and I wasn't tasting the steak at all,” she says.
“Now that I'm looking back, I do remember feeling some discontent in not fully being able to appreciate food,” Sarah says. “And I don't think I ever articulated it — I don't think I ever really thought too much about it — but I do somewhat feel a sort of discontent in not finding satisfaction in taste.”
What this study tells us, is that perhaps if we rethink our relationship with alcohol, we can rekindle our pleasure in the food we’re enjoying without any added complications erasing our cellular celebration. So the next time you sit down to a steak dinner, try pairing it with AF wine and see for yourself the difference it makes.
